Blood Moon
by ncfan
Summary: She understood. When the moon waxed, his blood boiled.


Roughly a year pre-series. Temari is fourteen and Gaara is eleven.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

* * *

Warm bodies dispersed and fled into the expanse of barren sand as the night grew closer to zenith and the moon rose over bone-white shifting sands.

Temari's night-blackened eyes soared over the dunes, searching for her prey with no trace of weakling mercy in her spirit. Her sun-golden skin was blanched to pale moon ivory, her hair to starkly glittering silver; she seemed to glow, her iron fan hovering behind her like a ghastly shadow.

Her prey was somewhere in that endless desolate sea, just waiting for their blood to be spilled. But it was not simply she that they feared. They knew Death was coming, that the sand spirit lusted after their blood and craved their mindless terror, that their deaths were a certainty and that that would be the only thing capable of sating him.

Temari dreaded that dark being as well. Though in theory they fought on the same side, the spirit was a monster, and hunter could just as easily become prey…

However, he was not with her at the moment. The drunkenly mad creature was nowhere to be found, so she was safe for the moment.

With a soft sigh of relief, like the wind being released from a cage, Temari slid down the dune, breaking further from the main group, to search out her quarry on her own.

* * *

Temari knew the desert like the back of her own small hand. She knew its caprices, its rises and falls. She knew what caves held water in their cool depths and how long it took a man to die in the desert's burning embrace.

She knew the signs of civilization staining the sand with their sins, even when man endeavored to conceal it.

There were some small gnarled bushes growing in that deep desert basin, most likely once a lake bed. The valley stretched nearly ten miles across, she knew, and apart from the bushes growing at the edges where the ground began to again slope sharply upwards, a steep hill of nearly fifty feet, and the small holes indicative of the burrows of reptiles, scorpions, tarantulas and small large-eyed mammals, there was no life there. That was an absolute.

Yet something was out of place. As Temari scoured the valley with her scalding and scrutinizing eyes, the calm, flat ground could have almost been the placid, murky surface of the primordial lake resurrected, but a blink of the eyes dispelled this image and made her realize that something was off.

The smell of smoke strained the air with its greasy pollution. Temari snarled at the acrid stench, searching out its source. A patch of freshly turned sand was roughly swept aside to reveal the remains of a sickly cook fire.

Branches of bushes were cracked and broken, scattered on the ground like bones, bushes Temari had never tread near. Her suspicion deepened, and a grim purpose settled like stone in her heart. They were near. She was close.

There were networks of caves around the lake beds, leading underground to where water still flowed, dark, freezing and crushing, the gaping mouths of the caves hidden by the larger bushes. Temari knew where to find them.

Silent as a shadow, grim as a reaper, she slipped towards that line of foliage, those bushes as barren as the stark white sand. She crept down the path laid before her, every mouth she passed blackening her resolve and chilling her night-vulnerable skin. The hairs on the back of her neck rose higher and higher; her tension rose and peaked continuously, no climax in sight. Something had to be causing her to feel as though the ground would rise and threaten to swallow her at any moment. The prey had to be cowering nearby.

As her hand ran smoothly over the sixth entrance, some small noise alarmed her already pricked ears. Her heartbeat spun out of control; she lost control of her breathing, and it came in sharp, ragged gasps. Once Temari realized that it was only a few loose pebbles cascading down the escarpment, she could have laughed at herself for how nervy she was becoming.

Soon she would be cursing herself for another reason.

Just when Temari finally began to convince herself that they prey had moved on and hers was an empty search, she was attacked. One scarred, muscled arm snaked around her wais; another hand clamped about her mouth to block off screams.

The next few moments were a fear-clouded blur. Temari wasn't sure how, but at some point her fan was taken from her and she was slammed to the sandy ground, her head shuddering off of a jagged rock and sticky blood beginning to mat her hair.

There were five men. As the leader positioned himself on top of her and roared for others to help him hold her down, they circled like a pack of jackals, howling ghostly pleasure until three of the four aided their leader, the fourth holding Temari's fan.

Everything was going to end. As she struggled violently against her captors, Temari felt the tickle of a kunai pressing softly against her cheek, running down her chin to her neck, she felt the visceral fear of the prey. She had fought, fought with all her strength, but she was small and these men were big, and she wasn't the hunter anymore. She had been the prey all the long, the prey of a pack of jackals, and like the jackals' quarry, she was going to die like an animal.

But then the situation spiraled again, and Temari would never know if it was in her favor or not.

A violent whip of sand flung the man off of Temari. She scrambled out of the way to avoid being caught in the inevitable crossfire, and that was when she saw him, silhouetted by moonlight and darkened by shadow.

The sand spirit. The demon. The beloved monster.

His slight form was not slight anymore. One of his arms was encased in shifting sand like a tumor grown out of control, shifting and quaking in blood-filled violence.

The eyes of the jackals turned prey rounded as they saw a creature transported from a pit of hell advance upon them.

He descended upon them. For one moment, Temari watched transfixed, mesmerized by the blood splattering across the sands. But then she remembered. At least one of them had to be taken back alive.

She edged near Gaara, lighting a hand on his unchanged shoulder. But he wasn't Gaara when he was like this, he wasn't her brother anymore. Temari found herself on the receiving end of a vicious sand attack.

As she was sent sailing away, the sand opened up a long shallow gash on her face, stretching in a diagonal line from the top of her left cheek down piercing the very edge of her lip, causing it to gush blood violently, down her chin, and slashing part of the material of her lavender dress, the iron netting protecting the skin there from injury. The sand scoured away the skin entirely from the wound, leaving exposed tissue and glinting blood visible to the moonlight.

Temari hit the ground on her back with back-breaking force. The sparkling blood drops near her glittered like ominous black rubies.

She could only watch as he descended upon the prey, _his _prey with a single-minded deadliness that was unholy in its palpable bloodlust.

Like an insane reaper, he ripped through the bodies of the hapless men. Their screams mingled with his own.

Temari understood. When the moon waxed, his blood _boiled._

His screams were filled with rage, with bloodlust unfulfilled, with insanity, and with some strange quality. Temari's horror at the slaughter taking place before her was doubled with the realization that that quality in his screams was anguish, with torment that could never be eased, with some aching, screaming agony.

It wasn't possible. But it made perfect sense.

She sat, crouched on her knees, terrified, trembling and whimpering, but unable to tear her gaze away from the carnage that was being ripped from the pages of destiny before her, as an act of hell tainted the world of mortals.

Blood stained the sand, pools of blood saturating the ground with its cloying stickiness, filling the air with its copper mephitis stench, and Gaara and the spirit both howled to the moon.

* * *

Because you know that something upon these lines had to have happened at least once.


End file.
